November 16, 2024: Swechha Rimal has joined the group as a PhD student from the Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Program. She'll be characterizing how DNJAB8 functions as a misfolded protein sensor.

November 8, 2024: Zi (Nicole) Yang has joined the group as a PhD student from the Environmental Toxicology Program. She'll be characterizing how stress affects protein import efficiency at the endoplasmic reticulum.

October 6, 2024: Dr. Ziqi Lyu has started a postdoc with Prof. Min Xue at the Icahn School of Medicine. We're grateful to his contributions over the years, and excited for his successes in the future.

July 24, 2024: Congratulations to Vivian Onwudiwe on her newly accepted review to Israeli Journal of Chemistry, where she considered the role that misfolded protein profiling can play in investigating disease etiology.

July 1, 2024: Joey has been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure. Thank you to all of the mentors, trainees, and collaborators that made this possible!

June 20, 2024: Congratulations to Maureen Montoya on her newly accepted paper to Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, where she considered optimization of Hsp40 affinity profiling. A particularly interesting finding is that although the basal recovery of cellular proteins by DNJAB8 is not strongly affected by J-domain activity, J-domain inactivation is necessary to allow misfolded proteins to accumulate on DNAJB8 during cellular stress.

May 1, 2024: Congratulations to Caleb Hong on receiving a Research Mini-grant from UCR Undergraduate Education. He will be using this award to investigate how the protein misfoldome evolves over time following cellular electrophilic exposure.

March 1, 2024: Prem Kushwaha has joined the group as a PhD student in the Chemistry Program. He'll be developing Hsp40 affinity profiling as a chemoproteomic technology.

September 29, 2023: Check out Guy Quanrud and Macon Abernathy's paper on ChemRxiv, where they profile proteins that are destabilized by cellular exposure to manganese and vanadate. There are several interesting findings, but one that stands out is that manganese destabilizes NKRF, a repressor of NFκB, thus explaining how manganese induces NFκB-mediated inflammation. We really enjoyed collaborating with Sam Ying and her group (including Macon) in Environmental Sciences.

August 18, 2023: Qiqi Lin has joined the group as a PhD student in the Environmental Toxicology Program. She will be determining the mechanisms that mediate stress-dependent mistargeting of secretory proteins.

July 20, 2023: Check out Ziqi Lyu's paper on BioRxiv, where he miniaturizes and multiplexes our approach for quantifying secretory protein mistargeting in living cells as a LC-PRM assay. Turns out it can be quite important to normalize signal against total labeling to control for drug-induced changes in labeling efficiency. He also finds that not all ER stressors induce pre-emptive quality control!

June 24, 2023: Congratulations to Jasmine Castellanos on her Research Highlight in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, where she discusses the findings and implications of the Lieberman group's recent discovery that calreticulin presentation mediates Natural Killer cell targeting of ER stressed cells.

June 20, 2023: Congratulations to Guy Quanrud on his newly accepted paper to ACS Chemical Biology, where he profiles how chloroacetanilide herbicides induce protein misfolding. Beyond what was demonstrated in the original preprint, we find that Hsp40 affinity profiling captures most of the targets identified through competitive activity-based protein profiling, revealing how this Hsp40 affinity profiling can be a powerful chemoproteomic method.

May 24, 2023: Congratulations to our latest PhD, Dr. Ziqi Lyu, for a great defense! We are grateful that Ziqi will be staying on as a post-doctoral scholar, developing mass spectrometry methods to probe protein mistargeting.

May 4, 2023: Jasmine Castellanos has joined the group as a PhD student in the Microbiology Program. We're excited for her future discoveries!

March 30, 2023: We've received an R01 from NIGMS! This 5-year award will be used to characterize the causes, mechanisms, protein substrates, and consequences of stress-dependent secretory protein mistargeting inside human cells. Thank you to the NIH, and also to Ziqi, Khanh, Melody, and Mateo whose efforts contributed to this proposal.

January 13, 2023: Our review on probing how environmental toxins impact protein integrity has been accepted at Molecular Omics. Recent advances in protein profiling technologies offer a unique opportunity to identify protein targets of environmental exposure agents.

September 29, 2022: Congratulations to Mateo Espinoza and Khanh Nguyen on their newly accepted paper to Journal of Biological Chemistry. The ER Hsp70 Hspa13 doesn't have a traditional substrate-binding domain, but Hspa13 doesn't let that get in the way of regulating protein import into the ER, with consequences for secretion, post-translational modifications, and protein homeostasis in both the ER and the cytosol.

June 27, 2022: Check out Mateo Espinoza's and Khanh Nguyen's paper on BioRxiv, where they demonstrate that the truncated ER Hsp70 Hspa13 regulates ER protein import, affecting proteostasis in both the ER and the cytosol.

June 23, 2022: Check out Guy Quanrud's paper on ChemRxiv, where he profiles the destabilized proteome after cellular exposure to chloroacetanilide herbicides. These electrophiles might be structurally similar, but they affect distinct proteomes. Propachlor in particular strongly targets GAPDH and PARK7, removing the cellular defense against protein glyoxylation.

May 24, 2022: Congratulations to Ziqi Lyu and Melody Sycks on their newly accepted paper at ACS Chemical Biology. See the challenges and promise of using proximity labeling to quantify protein mistargeting in living cells.

March 31, 2022: Check out Maureen Montoya's paper on BioRxiv, where she compares DNAJB1 and DNAJB8 for isolating client proteomes.

February 18, 2022: Congratulations to Dr. Guy Quanrud for a great defense! Guy is starting a position as a Research Scientist at Bridgene.

December 1, 2021: Check out Ziqi Lyu's and Melody Sycks' paper on BioRxiv, where they show how to use proximity labeling to characterize mistargeting of secretory proteins.

November 30, 2021: Congratulations to Guy Quanrud on his newly accepted paper at Analytical Chemistry, where he demonstrates that Hsp40 affinity can be used to identify proteins that are destabilized by environmental exposures.

September 22, 2021: Check out Guy Quanrud's paper on BioRxiv, where he uses Hsp40 affinity to identify proteins that are destabilized by just 15 min. of cellular exposure to arsenite.

August 23, 2021: Congratulations to Ziqi Lyu on his newly accepted review in ChemPlusChem, describing methods for characterizing protein trafficking and translocation.

August 6, 2021: Congratulations to group alumna Minh Tran on starting medical school.

September 10, 2020: Maureen Montoya is our latest PhD! Congratulations on completing your dissertation, despite the disruption of a global pandemic. Maureen will be a Research Scientist at Eurofins.

June 3, 2020: Khanh Nguyen defended her dissertation with an excellent presentation on her research. She will continue her investigations into proteostasis as a postdoctoral scholar with the Balch lab at TSRI.

March 31, 2020: Congratulations to group alumni Jose Montano and Ruben Elias for receiving prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Best of luck with your graduate projects!

October 10, 2019: Mateo Espinoza presented his thesis work on an ER import regulator. Thank you for teaching us about this fascinating protein!